Sunday, November 16, 2014

The OSR Explodes Into the Mainstream!

Actual Screenshot from my computer, 11:04 AM Sunday 16 November 2014

Okay, so when I ran into the bedroom screaming "I made it!" my wife looked at me like I was crazy. She often looks at me like that, so I wasn't offended. But her expression soon changed when she saw it."That's targeted advertising, honey."I have no idea what she meant by that but I think she's jealous.(Just so everyone knows, I don't usually read the Drudge Report. I just happened to have been doing scholarly research for a paper I'm writing on the psychological processes of RPGPundit.)

What's happening there is that Lulu is buying ads on what's called a programmatic ad network. Those networks have a lot of really interesting ways to target people based on their Internet browsing history. You've obviously looked at Lulu before so you're going to see those ads from Lulu, whereas a different person with different browsing habits would be seeing a completely different ad on Drudge Report. And Drudge Report is basically "renting" their ad space to these types of programmatic networks rather than selling it themselves.

The cool thing is that Lulu is buying an *audience* for their ads based on the habits of those people rather than just buying a bunch of impressions on Drudge Report and hoping that some of those readers are interested in what Lulu is selling.

The super cool thing is that Lulu chose your product to feature in their ad copy. Congrats!

Both Lulu.com and Amazon.com are ALWAYS showing me my own books, as if I didn't know about them and might want to buy copies. I think it's because I've looked at them on the retail side of their sites.

Yes. The funny thing is I already own 3 of the 5 items advertised--having purchased them from Lulu, one of them very recently. But I think the overall effect is positive, reinforcing my decisions and nudging me to make similar ones.